Epitherrien Farms Journal

Its hard to believe that you get to  pick a bunch of beautiful greens like this in Missouri during the first week of December, but this year was, once again, far from normal.  So much more rain in the spring and summer, right through August, that caused all our apple and pear seedlings to drop from the trees.  I had never experienced this before.  I stopped by an orchard on my way back from a short trip to Springfield and asked the owner about the lack of fruit.  She told me you have to spray the trees at the peak of flowering with a substance that allows the fruit to form correctly and not drop from too much water.  She told me to call her in the spring and ask about it again and she would share all the info with me.  Cool, I will definitely do that.  Of course, she also appreciated the fact I walked out of the orchard with arms full of apples to keep me satisfied until I got home to Connecticut at Thanksgiving to raid my Dad's Orchard stash.  Pounds Granny Smiths and Golden Delicious went home with us.  Steve complains the car still smells like apples!

Anyway, with a warm fall and no freezing in sight, right up until the middle of December, my crop of greens are doing well.  We covered our boxes of greens and hope to keep them growing right through the winter.  Swiss Chard, Russian Kale, 3 kinds of lettuce and lots of green Italian parsley.

With all the rain, we noticed we have many more Squirrels showing up and living around our Pecan Trees.  Now, with the drought for the past few years we had no meat in the nuts.  And, not a Squirrel in sight.  Well, this year we have plenty of them.  Only to realize in October that our pecans are big and meaty and we missed them all.  No wonder we have lots of Squirrels, they ate all the pecans! I got about 4 cups of them, that's it. Ah, you live and learn.  We just hope those Squirrels have not decided to make our farm their forever home!

Over the holiday break I tallied my yield for 2015.  Last year I yielded $2,345.00 worth of produce.
This year we planted less varieties and more of each variety planted.  Much easier to manage, but none left to sell. I honestly can't keep up with having 60 pounds of tomatoes ripe at the same time like last year.  So the tally for this year was $1,397.00.  Not too shabby!  And as you can see above, I haven't finished getting all the yield.

With the longer warmth, came critters staying out of hibernation longer.  In a 3 week period, from early to late November (temps were still in the 50's) we lost 11 chickens.  What a bummer.  Even our teenager chickens we hatched ourselves.  Steve has begun working on the new chicken coop which will have a huge chicken run to keep our babies safe while we are away at work.  They will be able to Free-Range on the weekends.  Well, I better get back to my seed ordering!